Tuesday, 28 June 2016

EU EU EU EU and the Land of the Pharaohs, let's be the crocodiles?????????????

Do you recall that marvellous shot at the end of Land of the Pharaohs (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046949/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_ps) when the villain looks down from the wall from which he is to plunge into the crocodile pit and sees them there with open, welcoming jaws - and then, as he plunges, we see him fall from the viewpoint of the crocodiles themselves - but never the impact?

Is that not the position in which we now find ourselves vis à vis the EU?

What would Jack Hawkins do and whatever was it that Joan Collins did? Will there ever be another episode? At the moment of writing the whole thing is turning into a crossover between a screw-ball comedy with Cameron as a goofy and unintentionally clumsy Jerry Lewis, and a rather coarse and vulgar tragedy of the kind that only Goves, Johnsons and Farages could produce. The number of vile politicians on both sides is utterly astonishing, with the hideous CD right of Schauble or Merkel looking like the moderates that they are not - as we know over the decades, but saw nakedly in their handling of Greece; the grimly neoliberal Juncker with his mafioso style denials of his running his country as a tax haven having anything to do with heading up the EU, actually demanding that the UK exit today and so act in conflict with the Lisbon treaty and UK Parliamentary procedure; and the skunk-like putridity of Le Pen and Farage coming head on with the pro-EU but hardly less fascist Eastern European leaders. Is there anyone to admire? Schulz, who tried to block the EU from one of its honourable moves in labelling West Bank products and who apologised to Netanyahu for even suggesting that israel might deprive the Palestinians of water? Pity the poor crocodiles, if this lot were to fall from the wall even their cast-iron digestive tracts would be sorely challenged.

The weird outcome of the stupidly anti-democratic and manipulative UK referendum is that disagreement, or mésentente, now rules; the staging of the sensible is reworked in an uncannily new décor and we have a chance to look long and hard at our own delusions and illusions. The racist or xenophobic insult to our new populations stands out clearly as a symptom to be accounted for - while on the one hand understanding that the much vaunted freedom of movement is not much more than Norman Tebbit's one time 'get on your bike' for the poor and, on the other hand, a privilege of the Eurogranted academics and art world tourists of whom I am still a hanger-on. We need to see this, and to look at the delusions as at the wounds, without shame and without lamentation as a state of things in which we might or might not find some kind of effective thinking ... I read three things today that beautifully support this reading, Chantal Mouffe, Etienne Balibar and Stathis Koevelakis